The new Athenian navy defeats Sparta in the battle of Naxos in 376, a victory won under the command of the Athenian Chabrias.

Timotheus, another great Athenian commander, captures Corcyra, which forms a new alliance with Athens, and defeats the Spartans at sea off wins the battle of Alyzia (Acarnania).

Athens, which has begun to reorganize its public finances and to build ships, introduces a new system of levying taxes by taxation groups, Symmories.

To make sure there are no cash-flow difficulties, rich individuals are expected to produce money for the state from their own resources and then recoup it from their taxation group.

Dionysius is forced in 376 BCE to pay an indemnity of one thousand talents and to conclude a peace that gives Carthage control of western Sicily and sets the Syracusan boundary at the Halycus (Platani) River.

Further, Syracuse must now pay tribute to Carthage.

The Athenian successes produce new members for the confederacy, from which some states have cautiously stood aloof.

In Boeotia, which Sparta, under King Agesilaus and initially the other king, Cleombrotus I, has repeatedly invaded in the years after the liberation, there is in 375 a surprising land defeat of some Spartan contingents at the hands of the Theban “Sacred Band,” a crack professional force of three hundred infantrymen led by Pelopidas.

This, the battle of Tegyra (near Orchomenus) anticipates the more famous Spartan defeat at Leuctra four years later.

The very existence of a Sacred Band is militarily significant, indicating that others are now copying Spartan professionalism.

All parties are exhausted by 375 BCE and ready to make peace, or rather to accept another King's Peace, in which Athens' improved position is acknowledged in a clause specifically giving it the leadership by sea.

Sparta concludes a treaty with Athens and the Athenian League in 374.

Helike, located in Achaea, northern Peloponnesos, two kilometers (twelve stadia) from the Corinthian Gulf and near the city of Boura, like it a member of the Achaean League, had been founded in the Bronze Age, becoming the principal city of Achaea.

The poet Homer states that the city of Eliki participated in the Trojan War with one ship.

Later, following its fall to the Achaeans, Eliki led the Achaean League, an association that joined twelve neighboring cities in an area including today's town of Aigion.

Also known as Dodekapolis (from the Greek words dodeka, meaning twelve, and polis, meaning city), Eliki became a cultural and religious center with its own coinage.

Finds from ancient Eliki are limited to two fifth century copper coins, now housed in the Staatliches Museum, Berlin.

The obverse shows the head of Poseidon, the city's patron, and the reverse his trident.

There was a temple dedicated to the Helikonian Poseidon.

Helike had founded colonies including Priene in Asia Minor and Sybaris in South Italy.

Its panhellenic temple and sanctuary of Helikonian Poseidon are known throughout the Classical world, and second only in religious importance to Delphi.

The city is destroyed in 373 BCE, two years before the Battle of Leuctra, during a winter night.

Several events are construed in retrospect as having warned of the disaster: some "immense columns of flame" appeared, and five days previously, all animals and vermin had fled the city, going toward Keryneia.

The city and a space of twelve stadia below it sink into the earth and are covered over by the sea.

All the inhabitants perish without a trace, except for a few building fragments projecting from the sea.

Ten Spartan ships anchored in the harbor are dragged down with it.

An attempt involving two thousand men to recover bodies is unsuccessful.

Aegium takes possession of its territory.

The city was thought to be legend until 2001, when it was rediscovered in the Helike delta.

Modern research attributes the catastrophe to an earthquake and accompanying tsunami, which destroyed and submerged the city.

Sparta has steadily lost ground in central Greece following the southern city-state’s expulsion from Thebes.

The Thebans energetically centralize Boeotia under their own leadership; for instance, they again gain control of the unfortunate Plataea, which must have been resettled at some point, or perhaps just gradually, after the Peloponnesian War.

Theban expansionism is bound to drive Athens and Sparta together before long.

Despite renewed fighting between Athens and Sparta in the west (374 and 373) and despite Thebes' continued, though increasingly reluctant, contributions to the Athenian navy (373), it is becoming clear that Thebes is the real threat to both Sparta and …